crunch

1. To process, usually in a time-consuming or
complicated way. Connotes an essentially trivial operation
that is nonetheless painful to perform. The pain may be due
to the triviality's being embedded in a loop from 1 to
1,000,000,000. "Fortran programs do mostly number
crunching."

4. To squeeze program source to the minimum size that will
still compile or execute. The term came from a BBC
Microcomputer program that crunched BBC BASICsource in
order to make it run more quickly (apart from storing
keywords as byte codes, the language was wholly interpreted,
so the number of characters mattered). Obfuscated C Contest
entries are often crunched; see the first example under that
entry.